A constituição do leitor cego no Ensino Superior: entre produções de imagens e estratégias para ler

Abstract

In order to be integrated in Higher Education, students ought to perceive reading as an activity that attributes meanings and fosterslearning. In thissense, as any other student, blind academics must also feel included in Higher Education, and this inclusion is permeated, to a large extent, by their background as a reader individual. Thus, this research questions how the constitution of blind academics as reading individuals happens at the university, considering the projection of images of themselves, of the other and the reading strategies that are mobilized (or not) in this process. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to discuss how blind academics become readers in Higher Education. In order to achieve this goal, we started from the theoretical contribution of Inclusive Education, to reflect about blind people in the scope of the university, and from Textual Linguistics, to discuss reading from this perspective. It was also necessary to make inroads into French-oriented Discourse Analysis, claiming above all the category of ethos to outline the images of self built by the research participants. To reach the objectives, we started from narrative research as a method, adopting a qualitative approach. Data collection took place through semi-structured interviews carried out with four blind students identified in the Student Management System of the State University of Montes Claros - Unimontes, locus of this research. In the interviews, academics were encouraged to narrate their reading experiences at the university, offering their understanding of their reading history in this discursive domain. Results demonstrated that the blind students become readers in Higher Education progressively through fundamental support of the others (professors/instructors, colleagues and the institution), from massive use of technology as a reading strategy and from the use of other reading strategies that they start adopting, such as the recurrent use of the internet to support prior knowledge in reading.